Cyberpunk TCG Starter Decks: Embracing Power vs The Heist

Every constructed Cyberpunk TCG deck needs exactly three Legends, and seven of the 27 Legends in the official database cannot be opened in a booster. Six of those seven come in two $29.99 boxes. That alone makes the starter decks more than a beginner product, and the cards-not-in-boosters breakdown covers that side: which cards are locked to which box, and the box toppers that reprint them.

This post answers the question that one does not: what is actually in each deck, how the two play differently, and which one to buy. WeirdCo published both full decklists on 21 August 2026. I matched every card against the official database on 2 October 2026 for its cost, RAM, power and sell tag, then pulled every public deck in WeirdCo's Deck Builder to see what players are doing with them.

What is in each box

Each starter deck is three Legends plus a 40-card main deck: 17 different cards at two or three copies each. The box's side panel reads DICE INCLUDED and lists all six Gig dice, d20 down to d4. ICv2's report on WeirdCo's GAMA Expo trade announcement in March puts each deck at $29.99, and WeirdCo's decklist post says both reach hobby stores on 6 November 2026, the same day weekly Night City Brawls begin.

The two decks have no card in common, because they share no colour. Kickstarter backers have been receiving the Beta printings, which carry a beta symbol on the box and a β prefix on each collector number. The card lists are identical.

Embracing Power, card by card

Legends: Goro Takemura: Hands Unclean (Green, cost 5, power 7, GO SOLO and BLOCKER), Saburo Arasaka: Stubborn Patriarch (Green, null cost, "Friendly ARASAKA Units have +1 power while attacking") and Yorinobu Arasaka: Embracing Destruction (Red, null cost: the first time a friendly ARASAKA Unit attacks each turn, draw 1, then discard 1 if you have less than 20 Street Cred). All three are RAM 2, so the deck's limits are Green 4, Red 2.

WeirdCo's own spotlight picks are Minotaur, Mantis Blades and Sandevistan. Every Gear in this deck adds exactly +2 power, which matters in the ten-power section further down.

The Heist, card by card

Legends: V: Corporate Exile (Blue, cost 5, power 8, GO SOLO), Jackie Welles: Pour One Out For Me (Blue, null cost: the first time you play a Blue Unit or Blue Gear each turn, you may decrease a friendly Gig by up to 2, and draw 1 if it becomes a min Gig) and Viktor Vektor: Sit Down and Relax (Yellow, null cost, a Call that searches your top 5 for up to 2 Gears costing 2 or less). Limits: Blue 4, Yellow 2.

Zetatech Faceplate is one of WeirdCo's three spotlight picks for this deck, alongside MT0D12 Flathead and Offduty Malfini. Flathead is the only Unit in the whole 151-card database with a sell tag, which is why it shows "Yes" in that column.

The two decks side by side

Three rows decide most of what follows.

The Heist is far cheaper to run. Thirteen of its 40 cards cost 1 Eddie, against five in Embracing Power. The Main Phase Sell action is once per turn, so a deck full of 1-cost cards wastes less of that trickle.

The Heist sells better. WeirdCo's sealed primer gives a target for this: the most successful players "settle somewhere close to a 55/45 split, in favor of sellable cards." That advice was written for 30-card sealed decks, not constructed. The Heist lands on 55/45 exactly anyway. Embracing Power sits at 50/50.

Embracing Power has the bodies. Its Unit count is the same 20, but those 20 average half a point more power, with Chrome Fang, MaxTac AV and Minotaur at 6, 8 and 9. Five of The Heist's 20 Unit copies are 0-power utility Units (Secondhand Bombus and Evelyn Parker: Scheming Siren), and its biggest is Heywood Ripperdoc at 8.

The rarity row is the honest value check: each box holds one Rare design (Shattered Memories, or Dying Night: V's Pistol) and no Epic, Secret or Iconic outside its three exclusive Legends. The Brawl pool row is covered in the Night City Brawl and Showdown breakdown. Five of the 18 Brawl promo designs are Heist cards, against three for Embracing Power.

The second Legend buys exactly five cards

Both decks run two Legends in one colour and one in the other, which is the 4-and-2 split the RAM guide lays out. Comprehensive Rules 3.20.4 starts every colour at a RAM limit of 0, and 3.20.5 adds each Legend's RAM to its own colour. Look at where the cards actually sit, though, and "main colour plus splash" turns out to be the wrong way to read it.

The one-Legend colour supplies most of the deck. Embracing Power has more Red cards (23) than Green (17), even though Green has two Legends. The Heist has more Yellow (21) than Blue (19). Every one of those 44 cards is RAM 1 or 2.

In RAM terms, the second Legend pays for five copies, and only five. Nothing in either deck is RAM 4. The only cards that need the 4-RAM colour's extra headroom are its RAM 3 cards:

That RAM x3 box is why Embracing Power's RAM budget needs two Green Legends. Swap one of them for a Red Legend and Red would open up to RAM 4, but those five Green copies would become illegal. The same trade sits under The Heist's Blue pair. Neither deck is wrong to make it. It is just useful to know that, in RAM terms, the "main colour" in each box exists to legalise two card designs.

How often the Legends actually fire

Embracing Power's Legends care about a tag most of its Units do not have. Both Saburo and Yorinobu reward ARASAKA Units, and the main deck's ARASAKA Units are Minotaur, Field Operator and Goro Takemura: Losing His Way: 6 of the 20 Unit copies. Goro Takemura: Hands Unclean is ARASAKA too and counts once he Goes Solo, because rule 4.2.1 makes a Legend on the field a Unit as well. The other 14 Units, including Chrome Fang and MaxTac AV, get nothing from either Legend. The deck is less of an Arasaka tag deck than its Legends suggest, and the tags breakdown explains why ARASAKA is still the best-supported tag in the set.

The Heist's Legends line up with its list. All 13 Gear in the deck cost 1 or 2, so every Gear qualifies for Viktor's Call. From a shuffled 40-card deck, the top five hold at least one Gear 88% of the time and at least two 53% of the time (hypergeometric, 13 Gear in 40 cards). Jackie Welles triggers off the first Blue Unit or Blue Gear you play each turn, and 14 of the 40 cards are exactly that. A Rules FAQ ruling adds one more trigger: playing a Legend from the Legends area to the field counts, so V: Corporate Exile going solo can set Jackie off.

One more fact about Viktor. The five Gear designs in The Heist are the only Blue or Yellow Gear in the database that cost 2 or less and fit this Legend line's RAM limits. Every Gear Viktor can find for this deck is already in the box.

Ten power is the number that matters

Comprehensive Rules 9.23.2.2 sets the steal count at (power ÷ 10) + 1, rounded down, so a Unit at 1 to 9 power steals one Gig and a Unit at 10 steals two. Rule 3.17.2 adds equipped Gear power to the Unit's printed power. Seven Gigs wins, so a two-Gig steal is a big swing. Each deck reaches 10 like this:

Embracing Power has two Units that hit 10 with no Gear at all. The Heist has none, and only five of its 13 Gear copies add +2. The Heist is not built around two-Gig steals. Its plan, in WeirdCo's words, is low Street Cred and card advantage, and MT0D12 Flathead "can't be blocked" while you have less Street Cred than a Rival.

Rulings to know before game one

WeirdCo's Rules FAQ, covered in full in the Rules FAQ breakdown, holds 53 rulings on cards in these two boxes. These are the ones that change how you pilot them:

What 1,234 public decks do with them

The Deck Builder's public browser listed 1,234 decks when I pulled every one through its API on 2 October 2026. Few of them stay with a starter deck's Legend line:

The individual Legends split much more sharply. Across all 1,234 decks:

For scale, the most-picked Legend, River Ward: Detective on the Hunt, is in 362. Together The Heist's three Legends fill 451 Legend slots in public decks, against 185 for Embracing Power's, and Yorinobu is the least-picked of the 26 Legends that appear in any public deck. This is what people build, not what wins. Sanctioned constructed play has not started yet: weekly Night City Brawls, WeirdCo's in-store constructed tournaments, begin on 6 November. And the earlier Deck Builder breakdown covers the limits of reading anything more into public lists.

Neither box is a best-of-3 deck yet

A starter deck is constructed-legal as it comes: three differently named Legends, 40 cards, no more than three copies of anything, all inside its RAM limits. It is not ready for best-of-3, which the Tournament Rules call the default way to play Cyberpunk TCG in tournaments (Appendix C.1). The Tournament Rules list "a sideboard of exactly 7 cards" as a constructed deckbuilding requirement (Appendix D.1), and section 1.2.1 runs store events as best-of-3 or as best-of-1 with three minutes of pre-sideboarding.

The only format a single box covers is "Quick" best-of-1, which Appendix C.2.2 lets stores choose for Night City Brawl events. It is one 30-minute game with no sideboard. (C.2.2 also names Pre-releases, but those are sealed events, so you build from the kit there, not from a starter deck.) For anything else you need seven more cards, and a single starter deck has none to spare.

Do not use the Deck Builder to check this. All 1,234 public decks carry its is_valid flag set to true, and 1,138 of them have no sideboard at all. Only 90 have the full seven.

Where each deck can grow

Each deck's colours and RAM limits allow 53 non-Legend cards from the current database. Seventeen are already in the box, which leaves 36 more per deck, all of them available in Welcome to Night City boosters. What the limits shut out is the more useful list:

Three things follow from that table.

• Embracing Power can add exactly one ARASAKA Unit from boosters: Sandayu Oda: Hanako's Guardian (Green, cost 7, power 8, RAM 2). The set's other ARASAKA Units are either already in the deck, out of its colours, or Yorinobu Arasaka: Steel Dragon, which is Red RAM 3 and locked out.
• The Heist's cheap Gear cannot grow without changing Legends. Every Gear costing 2 or less that it can legally run is already in the box. The one other legal Gear is NetWatch Netdriver at cost 3, outside Viktor's reach, and the Yellow Gear it cannot run are all RAM 3 or 4.
• The Pre-release promo fits neither box. Every Welcome to Night City Pre-release Kit includes Gorilla Arms, which is a Yellow RAM 3 Gear. Embracing Power has no Yellow, and The Heist caps Yellow at RAM 2.

Swapping a Legend has a name trap too. Rule 7.3.1 bars two Legends with the same name, and a subtitle is not part of the name (3.9.2). So Goro Takemura: Vengeful Bodyguard, one of the ten Pre-release kit Legends, cannot join Goro Takemura: Hands Unclean. V: Streetkid cannot join V: Corporate Exile, and Jackie Welles: Mama's Favorite cannot join Jackie Welles: Pour One Out For Me.

Each deck runs 11 cards as two-ofs, including both exclusive Units. No booster contains those Units, so a second copy of the same box is the straightforward route to a third Goro Takemura: Losing His Way, Dexter DeShawn: One Last Chance or MT0D12 Flathead. Minotaur also appears as a Night City Brawl promo. Leftovers from that second box can also make up a seven-card sideboard.

Which one to buy

One box: The Heist. It has the lower curve, more sellable cards, and Legends whose abilities key off 23 of its 40 cards (the 13 Gear for Viktor, the 14 Blue Units and Gear for Jackie, with four cards counted by both). Its exclusive Legends are also the ones other players build with: Jackie Welles is in more public decks than any other Legend you cannot open in a pack. That is a judgement from the lists and the numbers above, not from match results, because no sanctioned constructed event has been played yet.

Embracing Power if you want to win fights rather than dodge them. It has the biggest body across both boxes in Minotaur, two Units that steal two Gigs with no Gear, a Gear suite where every copy is +2, and a Green half that can legally run every Green non-Legend card in the set as you open them.

Both, if you can. They share no cards, so the pair gives you all four colours and six Legends. Before you build a third deck from them, though, the RAM guide is the next stop. For how Bandai handles the same entry-level decision, the Gundam Card Game starter deck guide is a useful comparison.

Quick reference

• Price and date: $29.99 MSRP each, in hobby stores 6 November 2026. Beta versions with the β symbol ship to Kickstarter backers.
• Contents: 3 Legends + 40-card main deck (17 designs), six Gig dice.
• Embracing Power: Red/Green, limits Green 4 and Red 2, Red 23 cards and Green 17, 20 sellable, average cost 2.9, Minotaur (9) and MaxTac AV (8) as the biggest Units.
• The Heist: Yellow/Blue, limits Blue 4 and Yellow 2, Yellow 21 cards and Blue 19, 22 sellable, average cost 2.5, 13 one-cost cards.
• RAM: in both decks, the second Legend of the main colour exists to legalise 5 RAM 3 copies.
• Ten power (two-Gig steals): Minotaur with Saburo face-up. V: Corporate Exile with Dying Night, which also readies 2 Eddies.
• Tournament-ready? Only for "Quick" best-of-1. Best-of-3 needs a 7-card sideboard the box does not include.
• Community picks (2 October 2026): Jackie Welles 188 of 1,234 public decks, Yorinobu 56.
• One box: The Heist. Big Units: Embracing Power. Both: no overlap, all four colours.